Pablo Picasso was one of the most innovative, experimental, prolific, influential, and controversial painters of the twentieth century. An updated and re-designed version of the large-format book published in the year 2000, this small-format Picasso. The Monograph 1881-1973 offers more than 1,200 new-scanned reproductions spanning the artist's entire career. The three authors are all experts: Léal and Bernadac --both former curators of the Musée Picasso in Paris-- are, at this time and respectively, curators of the Centre Pompidou and the Louvre Museum, and Piot coauthored the catalogue raisonné of Picasso's sculpture.

Brigitte Leal covers Picasso's formative years from 1881 through 1916, including his invention of Cubism with Georges Braque. Christine Piot explores the astonishingly fertile period from 1917 through 1952, and Marie- Laure Bernadac discusses the unabashed vigor of Picasso's later years, from 1953 until his death in 1973. Smoothly translated from the French, the book weaves biographical details and discussions

of the art into a concise narrative. ("Olga became pregnant in the summer of 1920, and in Picasso's work forms blossomed and flesh took on the massive quality of stone.").The authors keep an extremely tight focus on their subject, with only as much mention of Picasso's contemporaries or the outside world as absolutely necessary. The 16-page section on Guernica, for example, has barely two pages of discussion about the painting and its genesis.

In short, for any personal or academic art history collection, and for students or community libraries, Picasso. The Monograph 1881-1973 is unsurpassed.